RECOLLECTIONS AND REFLECTIONS
doors. The house was not a large one, and as by that time the number of students had increased to about 500, we were very much cramped for space. The Engineering Department was housed in what had been the stables* The stable itself was converted into the Lecture Room, and the hayloft above it into the Drawing Office, which had to be reached by an outside uncovered wooden staircase. The Chemical Department was more fortunate, as an adjacent house was used for the Laboratory. The only thing that could be called a Physical Laboratory was a room in which the apparatus used for Lecture experiments was stored. The cramped space was not without its advantage. We were so closely packed that it was very easy for us to get to know each other. Arts and Science students jostled against each other continually ; a crowd of mathematicians would be waiting outside a lecture room for it to discharge a Latin or Greek class. Thus one of the chief defects of non-residential colleges, the lack of opportunities for social intercourse between the students, was almost absent. Though I was only two years in Quay Street and three in the comparatively palatial buildings in Oxford Road, to which the College moved in 1872, my most vivid recollections are those of the old Quay Street days ; in Oxford Road we had more room but less company, and fewer opportunities of making friends.
Though Owens College was badly housed, no university in the country had a more brilliant staff of Professors. For Mathematics there was Thomas Barker, a Senior Wrangler and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge ; for Physics, Balfour Stewart; for Engineering, Osborne Reynolds ; for Chemistry, H. E. Roscoe ; W. C. Williamson, the distinguished palaeo-botanist, took all Natural History for his province, and lectured on Botany, Zoology, arid 12